The public network system over telephone lines known as the Internet, and particularly the portion of the Internet known as the World Wide WEB (WWW) has experienced rapid growth, and with this growth all sorts of electronic document services have been developed and provided to users. E-mail is arguably the most familiar of these services, and is provided by every Internet Service Provider (ISP) and in other ways as well. E-mail services may also be provided on other networks, such as Wide Area Networks (WANs) and the like.
Even though e-mail services have become commonplace and reliable, there are still some limitations. For example, e-mail services typically require the user to actively look up whether he or she has received e-mail, unless the user is permanently connected to the Internet. In some service packages, e-mail is delivered to a mobile device, like a palmtop-computer or a telephone. However costs in such systems are high per message and size, and if the user has no facility to review and veto delivery, he or she may receive attachments of several dozen kilobytes or even more incurring very high delivery costs. What is clearly needed is a smart filter system that operates firstly to decide, based upon certain criteria set up by the user, if, when e-mail is received, the user is to be notified by pager or similar services, and secondly if and where to forward mail. Such an enhancement in e-mail services allows the user to avoid being disturbed by unimportant messages, as well as to avoid high costs of unsolicited and or unwanted mail reception on expensive wireless systems or other remote systems.